Explore Authoritative Eighteenth-Century Archives

Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) is an essential resource for eighteenth-century research, but no one archive can fully cover a hundred years of rich history and discourse. Find more collections below that connect students and faculty to a more comprehensive view of eighteenth-century history across geographies, media sources, and an array of diverse perspectives.

Sabin Americana: History of the Americas, 1500–1926 covers life in the western hemisphere from the arrival of Europeans in North America to the first decades of the twentieth century. With more than 65,000 volumes from North, Central, and South America and the West Indies, this collection highlights society, politics, religious beliefs, culture, contemporary opinions, and momentous events through sermons, political tracts, newspapers, books, pamphlets, maps, legislation, literature, and more.

Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive is the world’s largest collection on the history of slavery, covering legal issues, modes of resistance, and much more from 1490 to 1896. The archive comprises more than five million cross-searchable pages sourced from books, pamphlets, newspapers, periodicals, legal documents, court records, monographs, manuscripts, and maps. Research guides, subject outlines, and scholarly essays are available to assist students in exploring these primary sources.

State Papers Online: Eighteenth Century, 1714–1782 encompasses the final section of State Papers from the National Archives in the UK before the series was replaced by the Home Office and Foreign Office series. Covering the reigns of the Hanover rulers George I and George II and part of the reign of George III, the archive provides unparalleled access to thousands of manuscripts that reveal the day-to-day running of the British government during the eighteenth century. 

The Making of the Modern World, Part I: The Goldsmiths'-Kress Collection, 1450–1850 covers the expansion of world trade, the Industrial Revolution, and the development of modern capitalism to showcase the evolution of the western world through the lens of trade and wealth. The resource provides access to an abundance of rare books and primary source materials, including 12 million pages from more than 61,000 books and 466 serials.

Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Nichols Newspapers Collection connects researchers to over 150,000 pages of printed text, spanning nearly 100 years of history. Essential to the study of British history and culture in crucial periods, this collection brings many rare news media resources and documents to scholars around the world in an easy-to-use, full-text searchable digital format. 

Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Burney Newspapers Collection comprises the largest single collection of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English news media available from the British Library and includes more than 1,000 pamphlets, proclamations, newsbooks, and newspapers. This collection helps researchers chart the development of the newspaper, from irregularly published transcriptions of parliamentary debates and proclamations to coffeehouse newsbooks to the newspaper in its current form.

British Library Newspapers is one of the most comprehensive ranges of regional and local newspapers ever assembled in a digital program, spanning the eighteenth to the twentieth century across Britain and Ireland. With just over 6.4 million articles across 252 newspaper titles, British Library Newspapers illuminates diverse and distinct regional attitudes, cultures, and vernaculars, providing an alternative viewpoint to the London-centric national press.